smp: does Mathematica use Lisp ?
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- Subject: [mg130304] smp: does Mathematica use Lisp ?
- From: debguy <johnandsara2 at cox.net>
- Date: Tue, 2 Apr 2013 03:25:28 -0400 (EDT)
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I've asked this question and looked into it. And it turns up some
things that help one understand how Evaluation and Symbols and
Matching arise moreso than having read the Mathematica Book sections
on "The Standard Evaluation Sequence".
Is mathematica driven by lisp? No. Yet it's got ideas from it yes.
You don't need to study Lisp unless you are using lisp through Run[].
Study Mathematica Book is all.
my bookmark senses say...
avoid Haskell: it's not mature, not much used, or well laid out for
beginning a large project.
Standard ML is worth a review as an amazing abstract language just as
much as Lisp is.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_ML
Finally. Mathematica's inner C language, smp, is worth a quick
review. It drives Mathematica's wonderful abilities of Evaluation and
Symbols.
Look into Mathematica's history on WR sites. They used X windows,
Postscript, ideas and abilities from many languages and gui toolkits.
Amazing how it all came together. But smp drives the language part.
The SMP pdf can be found. What are projections?